By Kevin Mooney – When Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) floated an amendment earlier this year that would effectively repeal ObamaCare, formally called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, union operatives offered up a forceful defense of the legislation. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) […]

By Robert Romano – It’s a perfect economic storm, and the clouds that are gathering now will have grand implications for 2012. Three mortal dangers imperil the U.S. economic Ship of State — and Barack Obama’s hopes at reelection, as each of them calls into question the […]

By Kevin Mooney – British Petroleum is anxious to start drilling at 10 existing development and production wells in the Gulf of Mexico before the end of the summer. However, officials with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, have told members of […]

By Bill Wilson – China may be preparing to cut its foreign exchange reserves by about two-thirds, down to about $1 trillion from its current $3.04 trillion level, according to Chinese news service Xinhua . Why? China simply has too much money , according to Zhou Xiaochuan, the head of the People’s Bank of China.  “Foreign-exchange reserves have exceeded […]

By Kevin Mooney — Here on the one-year anniversary of the British Petroleum oil well explosion, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have pulled together a few key statistics that call out for a major overhaul of U.S. energy […]

By Robert Romano – By now, it is common knowledge that the 2011 continuing resolution negotiated by House Speaker John Boehner, which cut $38.5 billion in budget authority, will only reduce 2011 outlays by about $352 million . That is mostly because the resolution did not address about $240 billion of budgeting authorities enacted by previous Congresses that have yet to be fully spent. Only when they are will outlays begin reducing in […]

By Bill Wilson – Now that Iceland has told international banks and the European Union (EU) to pound sand, by refusing to bail out the UK and Netherlands who covered the losses of British and Dutch investors who lost $5.8 billion in Icesave when the bank failed in 2008 , a funny thing has happened. Or has not. The Earth did not open up, sucking the North Atlantic island nation into the deep reaches. The sky […]

By Bill Wilson – The U.S. cannot say it was not warned. For years now, sovereign credit rating agencies have repeatedly told Congress to get its torrent of deficit spending under control, or else face a downgrade of its gold-plated Triple-A credit rating. Alas, we did not […]

Standard & Poor’s downgraded the outlook of the United States to negative today : “Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative […]

By Robert Romano – When he addressed students at George Washington University on the dire fiscal emergency facing the nation, Barack Obama attempted to lay blame for the $1.645 trillion budget deficit at the feet of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. Obama said , “we made the […]